Wasagamack, Pikangikum, Kashechewan And Attawapiskat, Just To Name A Few

When one looks up colonizer this is what you get: 1st establish a colony in (a place). □ establish control over (the indigenous people of a colony)

2nd appropriate (a place or domain) for one’s own use.

Is this woman, this Chief of her nation, Theresa Spence to die

Wasagamack, Pikangikum, Kashechewan And Attawapiskat, are just 4 out of a multitude of First Nations Reserves where the people are suffering, because the governments of Canada prefer to argue jurisdiction, cut funding to needed programs and when all else fails blame the conditions found on these reserves to be the fault of the First Nations Peoples themselves and spread demeaning propaganda and rhetoric designed to put themselves in a favorable light when it comes to public opinion. This is an ongoing genocide pure and simple and puts this country’s leaders and citizens in direct violation of international law and several sections of the United Nations Documents.

Bottled water sits on an airport runway in Kashechewan reserve in northern Ontario on Oct. 27, 2005, as residents hold up signs for media in the background. About 1,000 people were airlifted from the reserve because of illnesses caused by high E. Coli levels in drinking water. Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press

We as Canadians love to boast about our English and French heritage, our Christian religion on which our laws are based and from whose sense of humanity flows, ballooning out our chests with pride, talking about fighting for justice and equal rights and adequate living conditions for all people internationally and pointing an hypocritical finger at other countries and other leaders we accuse of human rights violations, but we have nothing to be proud of as we sit by and watch the horror show that is the deplorable conditions on at least 40% of our First Nations reserves claiming we as citizens have no obligation to First Nations People.

Eric Robertson of, Orangeville states, “Enough is enough. Some $90 million has been spent on that reservation and they are still begging for pity. I want to know where every penny of that money went before my government spends another penny. If it’s so bad up there, move away.”

Sheila Fraserthe last Auditor General of Canada, wrote of the problem of too many reports and not enough action being taken by all governments of Canada barring none in chapter 4 page 11 of her last audit. If you just take into account that from 2002 and 2004, the AG “identified a gap between the secondary school completion rates for First Nations people on reserves and the rates for other Canadians.”

In 2002, the Auditor General reported that “First Nations communities, many of them having fewer than 500 members, had to fill out an excessive number of reports for INAC (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada) each year, and that many of the reports were never reviewed and served no purpose.”

In 2003, the Auditor General chronicled the housing shortage on reserves and the need for major repairs to 44% of the dwellings.

In 2003 and 2007, the Auditor General told Canadians that “the federal government was not implementing all of its obligations under land claims agreements and was not living up to the spirit and intent of the agreements.”

In 2005,the Auditor General’s office reported on ‘the lack of a legislative regime to ensure that water quality on reserves met the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality, despite the existence of such a regime in every province and territory. “

In 2006, the Auditor General’s office reported back and said that little progress had been made in fixing the mold problem.

In 2008the Auditor General reported that “First Nations children were eight times more likely to be removed from their homes than other Canadian children.”

According the Auditor General’s report June, 2011, no progress has been made on any of the files and speaks to the lack of political will by all governments of Canada and the people of Canada to right these wrongs. The Canadian people, the voter, me and you are the government, we vote them into and out of power and up to now have been content to either get angry like Eric Robertson, or get angry for a day and state our feelings in comment to another’s blogs and feel we have done our part to right the wrong. I always wonder when I see comments acknowledging the wrongs done to our First Nations People and the anger being voiced at the fact that this is still going on today, what else the commenters are doing to help these people out?

Paul Connolly of Victoria, B.C. states, “Once again we are witnessing the level of poverty of First Nations across Canada, this time the Attawapiskat Reserve. The attitude of Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears to be to spend billions more on prisons and incarceration to house our impoverished First Nations’ youth rather than creating the conditions for social justice.”

Outhouses near the band office of the Wasagamack First Nation in Manitoba. The outhouses are used year-round, even in the winter. More than 60 per cent of residents in the Cree community 600 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg lack indoor plumbing. (Karen Pauls/CBC)

Today we are about to have happen what we are seeing around the world in other countries where the people or faction of a population rises up and shouts no more, we want to be heard we want our rights and we are tired of empty promises, more treaties, more studies while we drink dirty water, live in shacks, watch our people die and own nothing of what was once all ours. The Idle Know More Movement is long past due considering the past and ongoing treatment of our First Nations People. Our politicians see no political value in righting the wrongs of the past, or in honoring treaty rights and obligations, because through acts of genocide this country has reduced the First Nation population to what politicians consider an insignificant voting bloc. Only a million or so Canadians are status Indians and of these only about 500,000, live on reserves. While Attawapiskat’s Chief, Theresa Spence continues her hunger strike and Prime Minister Harper refuses to meet with her pressure is building to dangerous levels on all sides and the Idle No More Movement grows in popularity. The only question is if something does not change and this goes to the next level, which I see as violence, do the First Nations people become Freedom Fighters like we support as Canadians in Egypt and Syria, or do they become terrorists like we turn our backs on like the Palestinians or the Tamils in Sri Lanka?

A kitchen without running water on Pikangikum First Nation in northwestern Ontario. The sink has no tap because there is no indoor plumbing and the black plastic containers are for hauling water from a communal standpipe in the community. Coleen Rajotte/CBC

Remember this that the policy when colonizing a land and making it yours according to the British and the French was to wipe out totally the indigenous people or enslaving them. A small portion taken from an article I read titled, Colonization and Racism – Aboriginal Perspectives , by Emma LaRocque, PhD in which she writes, “Colonization can be defined as some form of invasion, dispossession and subjugation of a peoples. The invasion need not be military; it can begin—or continue—as geographical intrusion in the form of agricultural, urban or industrial encroachments. The result of such incursion is the dispossession of vast amounts of lands from the original inhabitants. This is often legalized after the fact. Historically, First Nation peoples (defined as Status Indians by the Indian Act) lost some 98% of their original lands through various legal means such as treaties and the Indian Act. Metis Nation peoples lost some 83% of their Red River lots through the Scrip program. The long-term result of such massive dispossession is institutionalized inequality. The colonizer/colonized relationship is by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of the colonized. Colonizers have always turned to racism to rationalize oppression. Racism is prejudice or discrimination based on the belief that one or one’s group is innately or genetically superior to another. Racists believe that “race” determines qualities such as intelligence, innovation, creativity and even morality. Colonization has been maintained through racial stereotypes, among other means.”

I am tired too, but I would guess that you already gathered that, so I will take a lesson from you and just ignore it for today. No finger pointing, no protesting and definitely no accusing statements today and surely no 3rd rate writing(smile), but maybe I will begin again tomorrow, maybe I will not be so tired of everything by then and more willing to once again rejoin the human race, with human feelings and emotions. I hope so, but today I am too tired.